As bells rang in the campanili on the morning of 5 June 1944, the American commander of the victorious Fifth Army, Mark Clark, climbed the steps of Michelangelo's cordonata towards the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline hill. Here, where Brutus, ‘still hot and eager’ from Caesar's murder, had come to address the people, where Augustus had made sacrificial offerings in the lovely Temple of Jupiter, where Greek monks had prayed in the church of S. Maria d’ Aracoeli in the Dark Ages, where Petrarch had received the poet's laurel crown, where Cola di Rienzo had fled down the stairway to his death, and where Gibbon had been inspired to write his great history, the leader of the men who had delivered Rome from the last of her foreign masters looked down upon the city which the Allies were now to control.
The tasks facing them were daunting. They had to feed a population swollen by a mass of refugees to almost 2,500,000; they had to restore electric lighting and repair the water supply; above all they had the problem of keeping order while introducing democratic freedoms to a people quite unused to them. Given the difficulties, they succeeded well enough. Although rationed except for use by the army and the hospitals, electric lighting was restored on 6 June. The telephone service began to operate again the next day. Before the end of the month the bread ration had been doubled to 200 grams a day, and banks, schools, the university, some libraries and even a few theatres had reopened. The postal services returned to normal on 1 July. Three months later the water supply, gravely disrupted by German sabotage of the main aqueducts, had been fully restored. Law and order were maintained with the help of the carabinieri and Finance Guards who had entered Rome with the Allies, and the offices of the new administration on the Capitol were handed over to the new mayor, the popular and consistently anti-Fascist Prince Filippo Doria Pamphilj.
Nevertheless, there were widespread complaints in Rome that repairs and reforms were not being carried out quickly enough, that the Allies were not living up to their promises to end the people's hardships as soon as the Germans were driven north. A popular song of the time was directed against the head of the Allied administration of the city, Colonel Poletti, an American of Italian extraction, who gave radio talks on current problems:
Charlie Poletti, Charlie Poletti,
Meno ciarla e più spaghetti.
[Less of the talk and more spaghetti]
Certainly the people, particularly the old and the pensioners, had grounds for complaint. The black market, which had flourished under the Germans, continued to prosper; yet the innumerable regulations and restrictions concerning food which were so irksome to the poor were continually extended. Buildings and vehicles were requisitioned without apparent necessity; Allied officials were often found to be intransigent or dismissive, while Allied soldiers were compared unfavourably with German troops who had usually been better behaved. Yet unprejudiced Romans had to admit that they enjoyed far greater freedom both of expression and of movement under the Allied occupation than they had done under the Germans, that the fear and oppression which had formerly overshadowed Rome had been lifted, and that the occupying forces seemed genuinely anxious to hand back the government of the city and the country to Italians as soon as possible. A more broadly based Italian government, replacing Badoglio's and deriving its authority from Crown Prince Umberto following the retirement of King Victor Emmanuel, had been formed immediately after the liberation of Rome; and on 15 August the city and its surrounding provinces were handed over to this government for direct administration under the supervision of the Allied Control Commission.
So, slowly Rome became the city of the Romans once more. Past wrongs were gradually forgotten, and the people recovered their natural good humour. While tribunals dismissed some Fascists from their posts and detained others responsible for serious crimes, while a few notorious figures of the former regime, like the deputy governor of the Regina Coeli gaol, had been lynched by the mob, and while the windows of some shops owned by Fascists had been stoned and smashed, there was an evident desire to look to the future rather than to resent the past. By a referendum in June 1946 the country voted for a Republic instead of the discredited monarchy. Parliament reopened in May 1948 after elections which returned the Christian Democrats with an absolute majority; and so, under the inspiring leadership of Alcide De Gasperi, and with Allied economic aid, Italy was able within a short time to take its respected place among the nations of the West, and Rome was soon to give her name to the treaty which inaugurated the union that binds so many of them together.
Six and a half centuries after Pope Boniface VIII had declared that 1300 would be the first of the Holy Years of the Church, Pope Pius XII presided over another Holy Year in Rome, pronouncing his blessing over the crowds as his predecessor had blessed the crowds in which Dante had stood. The Church's great traditions continued from century to century, yet the Church was gradually changing. In 1962 Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council, and over two thousand mitred bishops gathered in the huge central nave of St Peter's to take part in the deliberations which were to give authority to the Church's renewal.
96. Pope John XXII (1881–1963), sitting in his gestatorial chair, blesses the crowds in St Peter's Square during the celebrations for the seventieth anniversary of the Rerum Novarum in 1961.
In these years the appearance of Rome and the life of the city were being transformed too. An economic boom in Italy, which was to lead to the production of one and a half million motor vehicles in 1967, ensured that the traffic in Rome's streets became more congested and frequently more chaotic than ever. Outside the city walls new suburbs sprawled to the south down the left bank of the Tiber, to the north along the old road to Florence, east and south-east towards the Sabine and Alban hills and westward on either side of the Via Aurelia. The population, which had reached two million by the early 1960s, had grown to 2,830,569 by 1983.
It was an increasingly cosmopolitan city. The establishment of the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome in 1950
97. The Palazzo della Civilta Romana.
98. The Palazzo dei Congressi.
was followed by that of several other international bodies; by an increase in the two diplomatic corps, one accredited to the Republic, the other to the Pope; by an influx of students to the several academies maintained by most of the European nations and by America; by the construction of large new hotels; by the expansion of the film industry, centred upon Cinecittà1 and the consequent arrival of numerous technicians, writers, actors and actresses – pursued by intrusive paparazzi – to swell the number of artists and musicians who had found Rome so congenial in the past.
In politics the former authority of the Christian Democrats as a unified party had crumbled. During the economic depression which followed the affluence of the 1960s, while allegations of corruption against ministers caused a crisis in public confidence, the Communist Party, which had gained ground under the leadership of Palmiro Togliatti, made further advances. And in 1976, for the first time in its history, Rome had a Communist mayor. Many Communists, however, remained devout Roman Catholics. When Togliatti died, thousands of the mourners who lined the route between the Piazza Venezia to St John Lateran made the sign of the cross as the cortège passed, several of them after having first saluted it with a clenched fist. But to the left of the Communists and far to the right were such organizations as the Red Brigade and the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei. These were responsible in the late 1960s and 1970s for a succession of outrages in Rome, one of the most notorious of which was the murder of the Christian Democratic leader and former Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, whose body was found in the boot of an abandoned car not far from his party's headquarters on 9 May 1978.
Yet the subsequent reign of terror which some newspapers predicted never occurred. Rome was once again, in Belloc's phrase, ‘astonishingly the same’; and the city was seen to retain the lustre and the fascination which had held men and women in thrall for so many centuries. Throughout those ages poets and patriots, artists and historians, philosophers and statesmen have fallen under the spell of Rome, ‘mother of kingdoms, the world's capital, the mirror of cities’. To Virgil she seemed the beauty of the world, the natural ruler of the nations. To the twelfth-century Englishman, Master Gregory, the first visitor from his country to provide a detailed account of the city, she appeared ‘most wonderful’. Nothing could equal the beauty of Rome, ‘Rome even in ruins’. For Hildebert of Blois also, Rome was incomparable: ‘No other city can be compared to you, O Rome, even though you are almost a total ruin: in your destruction you teach us how great you were when you were whole.’ Dante called Rome life-giving and the Romans the people of God. For Milton she was the Queen of the Earth. Emperors considered her the preordained centre of authority. The Czars (Caesars) of Russia spoke of their capital as the third Rome, just as the ancient emperors had made of Constantinople the second Rome. Byron was repeating an ancient belief when he wrote:
While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand;
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fade;
And when Rome falls – the World.
Napoleon was obsessed by its spell and dreamed of Rome as the capital of his empire, creating his young son King of Rome. Mazzini too was obsessed by Rome. Garibaldi's cry of ‘Roma o morte!’ became one of the inspirational sentiments of the Risorgimento. Cavour could not envisage the Italian Kingdom without Rome as its capital. Mussolini sought to revive the Roman Empire. And his adversary, Churchill, in pressing for the capture of Rome by Allied forces declared, ‘He who holds Rome holds the title-deeds of Italy.’
In a far distant age Rutilius Namatianus wrote a moving panegyric of the city in which he claimed that Rome ‘has united all peoples into one nation and made all the world one city’. It is this universal element in the history of Rome which is the secret of its perennial vitality, which made it Shakespeare's ‘high and palmy state’ and which makes it still today the Eternal City.